Friday, February 21, 2014

The day before Lake Chabot

Tomorrow is the Lake Chabot Trail Run by Inside Trail Racing. It will have been 5 weeks since I ran the half-marathon at their race on Montara Mountain, the Pacific Foothills Trail Run on 18 Jan. I hope to make a good effort, so the question is whether my measurable fitness has improved sufficiently since then to make the 42% jump in distance.

So to check, I consider my tracking metrics, ATS and CTS, shamelessly stolen from Coggan and Allen's analysis of cycling power data. Instead of TSS I assign the stress to each day's work equal to the distance run or hiked, not including regular walking. I include today's anticipated 8 km run distance:

So for the past 5 days I've done a mini-taper by stabilizing my CTS at its present peak value of around 6.1 km/day. This has allowed my ATS to recover a bit from its peak of past Sunday without losing and CTS in the deal. Then after the race I'll take a week of recovery before looking forward to 50 km in April.

So going into Foothills my CTS was 3.9 km/day. So compared to that 6.1 km/day is a 56% increase, more than enough to cover that 42% increase in distance. That suggests to me I should be able to race this, not just run it to finish, similar to how I ran Foothills.

But I'm already looking ahead to that 50k. That's a 67% increase over the 30k. So if the CTS of 6.1 km/day works out for me here, that might suggest a CTS of 10.0 km/day would be good for that race. My ATS is already close to that, so I don't need to increase my training volume much from where it's been recently to get there. But I definitely need to stick to it, as my CTS trend line of 0.4 km per day per week in the 7 weeks before that race won't quite hit it.